Ice Blink by Stephen Bocking Brad Martin

Author:Stephen Bocking, Brad Martin [Stephen Bocking, Brad Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781552388587
Google: 5lmpnQAACAAJ
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2016-01-15T22:12:29+00:00

All of this effort—not to mention many conversations with Arctic “experts” and an extensive literature review—was funnelled into the centre of calculation that was Western Electric’s New York City corporate headquarters.80 By October 1953, it had prepared a “consolidated report” for the US Air Force, asserting that “a feasible route exists for construction of a distant early warning line using … methods and techniques as now proposed by Western Electric Company.”81 Receiving this and other documents, the recently formed bi-national Military Study Group (MSG) of strategists “could not escape the conclusion,” according to a June 1954 memorandum, “that there was a need for the establishment of the Canadian Arctic segment of the distant early warning line … a start should be made at once.”82 Similar technical studies were discussed at the October 1954 meeting of the Permanent Joint Board of Defence, where American participants used Western Electric material to confirm that “the necessary data to start work on the sites during the 1955 construction season [is] available.”83 The following month, Western Electric collaborated with a spin-off of the MSG, a Locations Study Group, to settle on a route for the Line, with its eastern end at Baffin Island’s Cape Dyer rather than further south at Resolution Island. By the end of 1954, Western Electric had secured the full contract for the DEW Line. “Consummated” in July 1955, it was a “package plan” based on a “cost, plus fixed fee” arrangement, which ranged from design to testing, with a completion date set for mid-1957.84

Western Electric had already created a “siting manual” for additional, more place-specific operations across the Arctic in 1955. With the help of Canadian and American aerial photography, surveying, and engineering firms, it quickly prepared detailed location reports for each future station. These texts relied on a variety of confident forms of geographic description and visualization. Each one included a section titled “Acquisition of Lands,” and this was tellingly a process rendered in strictly technical and contemporary terms.85 While Western Electric established a DEW Line Project Office in New York City, contractors quickly finished all of the siting work in Canada, and moved on, in the second half of 1955, to the Alaskan locations.86

“Conquered by Degrees”

When Western Electric received the contract to build the DEW Line, one promotional film portrayed the project as a “weapon system.”87 Months later, in one of the first media accounts of the initiative, journalist Leslie Roberts described it as “the first mass assault on the Arctic.”88 Despite the clear defence imperatives and the accompanying propensity for martial terminology, however, the DEW Line’s military purpose was simultaneously complemented and superseded by another discourse in the popular press, corporate journals, and government literature: the Line was merely a matter of “technical feasibility,” and the targets of “assault” were northern landscapes.89 According to a typical account in North, the bi-monthly magazine produced by Canada’s Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, “trials and related work” revealed that “the practical DEW Line could be built across the Arctic, despite rigorous climatic conditions and difficult supply routes.

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